Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev was the Russian president after Stalin died. He was born on April 15, 1894. He was brought up in a religious household. He joined the communist party in 1918, over a year after the group gained power during the Russian Revolution. Sometime during the Russian Civil War his first wife died leaving him with two children. He remarried in the future and had four more children. In 1929 He moved to Moscow, Russia and became friends with Joseph Stalin. He got a technical education and liked the idea of communism.
Over the course of World War II, Khrushchev sent troops to Ukraine and Stalingrad to fight the Nazi’s. During the last fight with Germany, nearly 200 tanks were damaged or destroyed after falling into
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He tried to rule with other high-ranking government but it did not work out. In 1955, he kicked Premier Georgi Malenkov out and replaced him with a friend, Nikolai Bulganin. He also put a stop on Malkenov’s attempt to regain power. In 1958, Khrushchev took the leadership role by himself.
Khrushchev made a speech in February 1956, that brought Stalin’s crimes to light. He criticized Stalin for deporting his opponents and making himself better than the rest of society, and for having poor leadership during the war. His speech was supposed to be a “secret speech” and stay in the country. However, In June the U.S State Department put out his whole speech. This caused Khrushchev to try and bring back some of Stalin’s ideas. This changed again in 1961, when he had Stalingrad renamed and Stalin’s remains moved from Lenin’s mausoleum which was located in the Red Square in Moscow.
Due to his “secret speech”, protesters in Poland and Hungary started riots. The Polish uprising was handled in a peaceful manner. On the other hand, the Hungarian uprising was violent, when it was over a minimum of 2,500 people were killed. 13,000 more were injured. Many Hungarians fled the country and headed west, while others were arrested or
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The U.S. went back to brinksmanship/ on the edge of nuclear war. After thirteen days of conflict the Soviets decided to back off. This resulted in JFK taking the U.S. missiles out of Turkey. In 1963 a partial nuclear test ban was put in place, between the U.S., the U.K. and the Soviets.
One thing Nikita Khrushchev could not stand was competition. He hated Mao Zedong, the Communist leader of China. If there was one thing that irked him the most this was it. In the 960s, Zedong and Khrushchev started to exchange words and they increasingly became worse. Khrushchev called Zedong a “ left revisionist” and told him he did not understand the way modern war was. The Chinese called Khrushchev a “psalm-singing buffoon” that did not know the extent of imperialism in the west.
In 1956 when Khrushchev gave his secret speech a lot of it was about what he thought Stalin did wrong and what lenin did.He starts off by saying that Marxism-Leninism denounces people from their personalities. It shows that he wants to allow more color into a world that is so black and white due to communism. He talks about how Lenin always stressed the role of people and that people create their own
A comparison of these two are Both leaders saw that changes were essential, they knew that without reforms, the Soviet Union would grow weaker and weaker. Khrushchev’s and Gorbachev’s reforms were wide and touched almost all important aspects of the government. One important aspect is how Khrushchev and Gorbachev saw the past and future. When Khrushchev came to power he had a big problem how to replace Stalin and how to rule the country after him. Stalin ruled through a cult of personality and many people thought that he was irreplaceable. At “the Twentieth Congress of the Khrushchev attacks Stalinism and the Cult of Personality in the secret speech, he denounced Stalin and the terror of his regime, everything Stalin did or said was incorrect,
He would always try to stay one step ahead of other countries and try to begin new projects which seemed to fail. Joseph Stalin had many people suffering and killed when he was
Joseph Stalin became leader of the USSR after Lenin’s death in 1924. Lenin had a government of abstemious communist government. When Stalin came into government he moved to a radical communist society. He moved away from the somewhat capitalist/communist economy of Lenin time to “modernize” the USSR. He wanted to industrialize and modernize USSR. He had overworked his workers, his people were dying, and most of them in slave labor camps. In fact by doing this Stalin had hindered the USSR and put them even farther back in time.
death in 1953. But how is it that Stalin emerged as the new leader of
Despite the appearance of goodwill exhibited in Khrushchev’s speeches, a Western leader would be inherently skeptical of the Stalin crony as he attempts to gain and maintain power over the Soviet Union and his own party. An obvious politician, Khrushchev’s “peaceful coexistence” and “Secret Speech” in February 1956 served to distance him from the unpopular and failing Stalinist approach of communist control. His rhetoric, however, remains no less expansionist than his predecessor. Specifically, in his comments on “peaceful coexistence”, Khrushchev emphasized the ultimate triumph of the socialist system, but concedes that military intervention alone will not achieve such a victory (Judge & Langdon, 339). Rhetoric aside, one must consider Khrushchev’s
Khrushchev rose steadily up the party ladder, always combining his talents as an administrator with his technical training. After assignments in the Ukraine, he became head of the Moscow regional party committee, and in 1934 he became a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist party. In these positions he directed the construction of the Moscow subway. Although increasingly influential, Khrushchev was never an intimate associate of Joseph Stalin; he concentrated on technical rather than political accomplishment. After World War II he was brought back to Moscow, where he became ¡¥one of stalin¡¦s top advisers¡¦. When Stalin died in 1953, Khrushchev used his wit to thrust all his opponents for leadership, including Malenkov. He became both Party Secretary and controlled the government through his associate Marshal Bulganin, who he named Premier. He ruled from 1956 to 1964.
It was not until the 10th of July, that Stalin was appointed to the position. As the three million German forces crept closer to Moscow, panic began to pervade all of the USSR because the military had been removed from its best commanders in the 1930s, and it took much time for the Soviets to reorganize” (Wegner 381). The Germans failed at first to bring down the Soviet Union, but they continued to attack and attack until the Soviet Union and Stalin would fall. After the Soviet Union’s victory against Germany, Stalin was in critical condition and it was near the end for the chaotic tyrant. “In the early morning hours of March 1 1953, after an all-night dinner and a movie, Stalin arrived at his Kuntsevo residence 15 km west of Moscow centre, with interior minister Lavrentiy Beria and future premiers Georgy Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin, and Nikita Khrushchev, where he retired to his bedroom to sleep.
Lenin made a series of policies throughout the beginning of the Revolution and through his short time in public office that came to be collectively known as ‘Leninism’. There were many things that influenced Leninism, such as Karl Marx. Lenin had read Karl Marx and his...
Stalin was “born in Gori, Georgia” as the third and only surviving child of a “cobbler and ex-serf”(Compton’s 403). His true name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. “In 1912 he took the alias of ‘Stalin’, from the Russian word stal, meaning ‘steel”, hence his nickname “Man of Steel”(Compton’s 402). Stalin began his studies at the seminary as a devout believer in Orthodox Christianity, where he was soon exposed to the radical ideas of fellow students. In 1899, just about the time of graduation, he gave up his religious education and to devote his time to the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy. In 1902 Stalin was hunted down and arrested by the imperial police for organizing a large worker’s demonstration. A year later he was sentenced to “exile in the Russian region of Siberia, but soon managed to escape and was back in Georgia by early 1904”(Archer 58). When the Russian Social Democratic Party split into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions, Stalin sided with the Bolsheviks, who just happened to be led by Vladimir Lenin. Stalin immediately became a staunch follower of Lenin, studying his every move. He did marry in 1905 but his beloved bride died of tuberculosis two years later. Their son, Yasha, died later in a Nazi Prison camp during World War II. After the Bolshevik’s Civil War victory, Stalin became highly organized and was elected secretary of the Communist Party. “After Lenin’s death, Stalin gradually isolated and shunned his political rivals, especially Leon Trotsky, and by the end of 1929 Joseph Stalin had succeeded in eliminating his opponents and became the supreme leader of the USSR” (Compton’s 404).
In the beginning Josef Stalin was a worshiper of his beloved Vladimir Lenin. He followed his every move and did as he said to help establish and lead the Bolshevik party. Much of the early part of his political career was lost due to his exile to Siberia for most of World War I. It wasn’t until 1928, when he assumed complete control of the country were he made most of his success. After Lenin’s death in January 1924, Stalin promoted his own cult followings along with the cult followings of the deceased leader. He took over the majority of the Socialists now, and immediately began to change agriculture and industry. He believed that the Soviet Union was one hundred years behind the West and had to catch up as quickly as possible. First though he had to seal up complete alliance to himself and his cause.
The meeting eased the tensions between the U.S and the Soviet Union, although it “failed to meet an agreement on arms control and other international issues.” President Eisenhower offered a proposal called “open skies” which would allow for both countries to use air surveillance to gather intelligence on the other countries military capabilities, however Khrushchev declined his proposal. Hopes for an agreement came again in September of 1959 when Khrushchev came to the United States. Unfortunately there wasn’t an agreement made but both agreed to meet in Paris in May of 1960. Then bitterness arose over the U2 spy plane incident, Khrushchev demanded an apology from President Eisenhower at the meeting in Paris.
Stalin, a paranoid ruler, always feared his political opponents, military officials and even common citizens. In his mind he felt they were...
Joseph Stalin is a polarizing figure. Decades after his death his legacy still continues to create debate about his tumultuous years as the leader of the Soviet Union. This is evident throughout the four documents while some praise Stalin as impeccable others criticize his policies and lack of political, economic, and social progress during his regime. Even though Stalin was behind various violations of human rights he was able to maintain the Soviet Union during a time of turmoil both domestically and internationally as a result he has earned notoriety as a great leader and advocate for Marxist ideology.
Politics has always been about image. A good image leads to power, it's that simple. Sometimes it is hard to draw the line between a leader who is genuinely interested in improving the lives of his people and one that is interested in filling a few more pages of the already crowded History book. A good example of this is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in its transition time between 1953 and 1964. The tyrannical rule of Joseph Stalin in the USSR was finally over, and the nation sought a new leader; after nearly a decade, one man, Nikita Khrushchev, rose up from the ranks with new ideas for the nation, and an extreme anti-Stalin campaign. But was he truly enraged at the way Stalin ruled or was he using this image in an attempt to capture the same power as his predecessor? The link between the two leaders goes back many years, to nearly the beginning of the communist annexation of Russia. Even today, we find ourselves asking if the politicians we vote for say they will make a reform to actually help the people, or if they say it as an empty promise in a ploy to get elected or to gain power. Was Nikita Khrushchev a man for the people, or was he simply a puppet with motives unseen to the people that pulled his strings?